


lying low at Lupin's

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-30
Updated: 2010-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-08 12:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	lying low at Lupin's

Remus is making tea, in a blackened, and slightly crooked kettle.

 

Remus, it seemed at times, always made tea. Half your memories—what precious few are left—seem to contain, somewhere, just out of focus and off to one side, Remus making, serving, or drinking tea.

 

Like right now, because this is a moment of stress, and Remus John Lupin requires tea at all such times.

 

You would prefer something rather stronger, were it not impolite to ask for, but Remus’ hands trembled, splashing tea into the chipped saucer that matches the cup—not chipped, that, but the delicate tracery on the china is faded.

 

“You’re sure?” Remus is faded—pale face, and stupid brown moustache and floppy brown hair all slowly turning a uniform grey. “I don’t doubt you, but you are sure?”

 

“Harry saw him,” you say. “He was nearly killed. Another boy was killed—Cedric Diggins, I think.”

 

“Diggory,” Remus corrects, and you remember—realise, you can only remember what you’d forgotten, not what you never knew—that Diggory would have been one of Remus’ students as well. “How did he die?”

 

“Peter killed him.” Old friend, old traitor, and you’d trusted him more—fool, blind, hadn’t you learnt, already, that Remus’ secrets harmed only him? “Voldemort ordered it, of course.”

 

Remus nods, takes refuge in his cup. Yours steams in front of you, untouched. You’ve never liked tea much. That had been Remus’ province. Lily’s too, once all things were in her dominions. “So the Order’s being revived?”

 

“Aye.” The table you’re sitting at, these two shabby men you’ve become, is as scratched and beaten as you are. Unbroken, though, and that means something, perhaps. And perhaps you should ask Remus for a bed, rather than a drink, if you’re finding similarities between yourself and a table.

 

“And who are you going to, after this?”

 

“I’ve gone everywhere else, already.” Not that there had been many places to go to—so many of them died, in that first horror. More than decimated. But they’d been lucky, those who died young and glorious. Better a hero’s grave—heroes, those scared boys and girls pitted against enemies magnitudes more powerful—than this slow decline that has changed you into shadows and wraiths. Not even echoes of your former selves, because you’d hoped other things for those selves. And this house you’re in should have been familiar, had it even needed to exist. You’d thought it wouldn’t, once. But you’d thought many things, and none of them had included Azkaban, or a world without James.

 

“What’ll you do now?” Remus’ eyes are downcast, lashes nearly brushing the skin—you knew the feel of them against your skin once—but that was a different you and a different him.

 

“Dumbledore told me to stay here,” you confess. “If it inconveniences you, though…”

 

“Stay, Padfoot.” The smile’s one thing that hasn’t changed, in all this time, though maybe it has and you simply don’t remember what it used to be like. “It’s entirely convenient.”

 

And that’s not entirely true, though perhaps not a lie, either. But you really have nowhere else to go, and this shabby home seems palatial after the caves you’ve lived in, these past months, and there’s something, still, in this greying man that recalls the man you stopped trusting, and, behind that, of the boy you rather loved, once, when you were bright and sharp and brittle. So you nod, and push your chair back, and help him set up a cot in his room, and stop yourself from hoping that it will not long be used.


End file.
